


no side on the sidewalk

by chickenfree



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: ADHD, Domestic, Established Relationship, M/M, [molly wizenberg voice] celeste pizza for one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23014204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chickenfree/pseuds/chickenfree
Summary: "He turns back to Phil with a wide smile, glowing like the sun. It makes Phil’s heart stutter. It’s – a good day, for him. A good day, and he trusts Phil enough to let him see the goofy chaos, trusts him enough to grin instead of shrinking every time Phil interrupts."
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 22
Kudos: 73





	no side on the sidewalk

Dan’s trailing his movements like a lost dog, wide eyed and studying every time Phil looks back.

Phil realizes that as much as they’ve talked, he’s still not entirely sure what Dan knows and doesn’t know.

Phil’s comfortable talking cameras with his school friends, or with PJ and the other people he’s sort of kept in touch with from conferences. He can be a dork around them and trust that they won’t get confused or roll their eyes because he’s too much. Dan – Dan is a weird middle ground. He doesn’t think Dan would laugh or roll his eyes, but he doesn’t really know how Dan sets things up, either, doesn’t know if he cares about checking the exposure first or double (triple) checking the mic.

Phil pokes around like he always does, for lack of a better plan. He figures Dan’ll ask questions if he wants answers.

He does, a few times, quietly asking some things that make sense and some things that are absolutely mad, like whether Phil uses a color checker when he’s making stupid videos about dead owls.

He jokes around a little bit, but mostly he’s just – strangely careful, like they’re in an art gallery or something.

“Does this look good?” Phil asks, eventually. Dan hasn’t given any input on anything, and Phil doesn’t want him to feel – neglected, or anything, like Phil’s crowned himself king just because he has a stupid degree.

Dan shrugs, lips twitching. He’s still staring at their little set up, even as he moves to sit in front of the camera; his eyes keep dancing to look up at Phil’s janky secondhand light or at his rickety desktop or at a shadow cast on the wall.

“I can move things,” Phil presses, when Dan doesn’t actually respond. “I don’t – it’s not set in stone, like. I don’t know how you set it up.”

Dan suddenly cracks into a smile; he finally looks Phil in the eye.

“My nana’s old camera on top of a maths textbook from two years ago,” he says, softly. “I think this is a little better.”

\--

Phil starts laughing. Dan freezes, staring at him wide-eyed.

He’s been roaming the kitchen with his pizza in hand, singing a song about how he’s made out of pizza and if he gets too warm his cheese body will melt. Phil’s just been sitting on the couch with the rest of the box, trying to wolf down as much as he can while Dan’s not paying attention.

“I like your song,” Phil says.

“Sorry,” Dan answers, nonsensical. He’s gone bright red, now, and still looks like he thinks Phil’s going to shout at him or something.

“I like it,” Phil repeats. “Come sit?”

Dan finally does. He curls up small next to him, leans over once to bump the side of his head against Phil’s in some vague greeting. He’s oddly quiet, still, but Phil can feel him humming a bit under his breath, wiggling to get comfortable.

“You know what I would do if I was rich?” Phil says.

“What?”

“Buy toppings.”

_“Oh,”_ Dan says, comically serious and once again a bit too loud for the hour. “Oh my god, what toppings? Did you see that one they had?”

\--

“Well, do you want help, then?” Phil says, after a minute.

Dan’s still glaring down at his laptop, forehead creased in concentration. He looks so focused.

“No,” Dan says, sharp and grumpy. His fingers twitch over the keyboard like he’s rehearsing how to work.

“I can just finish the editing.”

“No. No, I can’t – you can’t, because I have to finish it. Because you did the other one, and I’m not going to learn if I don’t practice.”

It takes Phil a moment to sort out the floppy noodles of Dan’s train of thought, but it makes sense once he does. Well. Except for the part where he’s been staring at this for ten hours. Or the part where he said he would study for a stupid law exam just as soon as it was done, and now god knows when that’s going to happen. Except for the part where he’s sat completely askew on the couch, hands literally vibrating over his laptop like they’re working without Dan when the rest of him won’t, or the part where they aren’t even accomplishing anything. Where they haven’t accomplished anything in ten hours, other than driving Dan into a whirl of – whatever this is. Phil can’t understand those parts.

He sighs before he can stop himself. It’s more of a yawn that’s escaped in the wrong direction, but Dan doesn’t know that, and doesn’t react like that. Phil watches him flinch in slow motion, curling into himself even farther and somehow setting into stony determination at the same time. Phil’s too dazed to do more than watch with as much interest as he can manage at this hour, cataloguing for later.

“When are you gonna be done?” Phil murmurs. Might as well.

Dan goes silent. Phil doesn’t believe in vibes or auras or any of that – except for with Dan, whose thoughts he can hear vibrating around the apartment even on the rare occasion that he’s not actually talking. His brain sounds like a pinball machine. It’s not weird of Phil to think that.

“In a minute,” Dan finally says, an absolute non-answer. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

—

Dan doesn’t want to talk about it. Phil doesn’t want to talk about it either, really.

Dan manages to say at one point that he’d rather focus on youtube, anyways, that he always liked acting classes best, besides.

Phil doesn’t say anything about how he’d moved across the country. He doesn’t say anything about the tuition money. He doesn’t say anything about how they have essentially one half of a proper job between the two of them. He doesn’t say anything about how Dan shakes as he says he’s quitting.

They don’t talk about it, and somehow he can’t stop thinking about it.

—

“It’s cute,” Phil says.

Dan’s curled around him, pressing closer and wiggling and generally being a lot.

“It’s not cute,” he says, breath against Phil’s neck. “It’s fucking stupid.”

Phil hums, adjusting a bit.

“Well, you’re cute and this is you, so.”

“I don’t want it to be,” Dan says, whine creeping into his voice. “It’s – I don’t like it.”

“Tough, Howell,” Phil says, flippant. Dan pinches him, quick and right under his ribs, but he giggles when Phil shrieks and Phil supposes that’s worth it.

-–

It’s – almost but not quite entirely a wreck.

The whole mess is an emotional roller coaster. They get the news – or some news, at least, which is better than no news but also much worse than _actual news._ It’s pure elation for about three minutes. Then they’re falling headlong into a spiral of hunting for a place. Phil’s excited, but it also involves several miserable conversations where he essentially ends up in a written contract with his own dad.

They make it, by the skin of their teeth.

The new place is fine. Well. Other than the half-built furniture shoved into the corners, which Phil doesn’t want to talk about.

He keeps waking up to find Dan asleep on the couch, surrounded by pages of torn out legal sheets, scribbled with maths that doesn’t quite make sense. He leaves notes in the margins about _the price of bananas in january_ and _cost of socks._ Phil can never quite wrap his head around them, not without asking. Dan always wakes up bleary and disoriented, always mumbles half-nonsense about how he just needed to write it down.

Phil can’t remember if they really had a routine in Manchester, or if he’s just idealizing it, but – he doesn’t remember sleeping alone so often.

–-

“I should exercise,” Dan says. He’s sitting up on the edge of the bed for reasons Phil can’t understand, hand twisting in the blanket in a way that keeps tugging it farther and farther away from Phil’s side.

Phil’s heart stops for a moment. Dan’s idea of exercise is – unconventional, sometimes.

Sometimes he tucks into Phil and they come out closer for it, pinned together and warm in bed.

Sometimes he leaves into the dark.

Sometimes he comes back and says he’s found something, some place that brought him some kind of satisfaction, and he’ll take Phil with him a week later and show him so they can share it, and sometimes that makes up for how Phil has to sit at home, swirling with worry, while he goes on his quests.

Sometimes he comes home and he hasn’t found anything, though. Sometimes he says he’s trudged up and down the same street or around the park until the dark scared him, and he’s bone tired but he’ll lay in bed and stare at the ceiling while his feet twitch like they’re still walking, looking for something he can’t find.

Phil jerks back into the present, realizes that he’s been gone for a minute and that Dan’s feet are tapping absently against the floor now.

“What, like, right now?” he asks.

“No, not in the dark,” Dan says impatiently, like it’s unheard of. “I – just, I mean – whatever. Generally.”

“Do we still have a gym membership?”

Dan makes a noise that isn’t quite a groan but sounds something like _I hate this topic_ to Phil’s ears.

“I think.”

“Well.”

“Disgusting,” Dan says, but his hand unclenches from the blanket and moves to smooth over Phil’s bare arm instead, then to mess with the hair at the nape of his neck. “And boring. _And_ stupid.”

“We’re paying for it,” Phil mutters, tipping his face back into the pillows.

“We’re not paying to _go_ there,” Dan says seriously. “We’re paying for the idea that we could go there.”

Phil sighs.

“If you’re awake enough to make jokes you’re awake enough to go edit a video.”

Dan groans, but he goes, leaving Phil to his worries.

-–

“Daniel,” Phil says.

Dan’s ping-ponging around, carrying on a conversation about – something? The mating habits of beetles? Some other weird thing Phil can’t keep up with? It’s gotten increasingly one-sided, whatever it is. He has music on, thumping around the room, and he’s allegedly clearing the dishwasher, dropping the silverware into the drawer with a loud clatter.

“Dan,” Phil repeats.

He turns back to Phil with a wide smile, glowing like the sun. It makes Phil’s heart stutter. It’s – a good day, for him. A good day, and he trusts Phil enough to let him see the goofy chaos, trusts him enough to grin instead of shrinking every time Phil interrupts.

He squints a little into the too-bright lights as he watches Dan’s face rearrange into concern, hides as Dan turns off the music and closes the dishwasher and pads over, carefully quiet.

“Hi,” he hears Dan say, soft and somewhere nearby now. “Y’alright?”

He settles down on the floor between the coffee table and the sofa, big warm hands loosely wrapping around Phil’s ankles. It’s almost too much contact for Phil to take, sometimes, and Dan’s – so careful with that. He knows that, logically. It kills him, though, that he’s riled by Dan just existing in his space – in _their_ space – when Dan is trying so hard to be careful.

“Just a lot,” Phil says, wincing as soon as he does. He knows how Dan reacts to those words, but he can’t come up with anything else.

He can hear Dan’s pause like it’s a sentence, imagines the flipbook of expressions he’s going through while Phil won’t even look at him.

“Okay,” Dan says, simply, startling Phil even though he’s trying to be quiet.

Phil can’t come up with a response to that, too off kilter to put words into an order that would make sense and wouldn’t come out mean in a way he doesn’t want.

“Has it been like this all day?” Dan says, after a minute. He sounds a little bit hesitant, like he doesn’t know if he really wants the answer. Phil shakes his head, as emphatically as he can, considering.

“Came on quick, huh?” Dan offers.

“Yeah,” Phil manages. “Fuck.”

“Fuck indeed, babe,” Dan says, solemn. Phil huffs.

Dan sits with him, gently running a thumb back and forth over Phil’s ankle.

Phil can feel him practically vibrating after a minute. He doesn’t do well with sitting still like this, has to work at being steady just long enough to keep Phil afloat. Phil knows that. Part of him wants to bury himself in bed, send Dan off to do whatever he does on his own, forget that this happened and that Dan caught him in a moment of disarray.

He opens his mouth to say so, but – Dan takes a breath, lets it out slow. He does it again, fingers stuttering a few times until they’re sweeping in rhythm over Phil’s skin.

“Thanks,” Phil says instead, after a minute.

“No problem,” Dan murmurs, like it really isn’t.

—

He says it’s like the tide goes out, some days, and suddenly he’s left with a vast expanse where he used to have a stirring mess.

They’ve – talked about it, sort of. Sometimes the conversations are so stilted that Phil finds them almost unrecognizable, wonders whose ugly puppets are talking with their voices.

There’s days where the emptiness is too strong, Dan says, slow and careful. Days where he needs to move and he can’t, and days where it starts to gather into something more menacing than just emptiness, sends Dan fumbling for something to hold onto. He doesn’t like to admit to that part. He only ever tells Phil after the fact.

Phil can’t tell if this is one of those days. He doesn’t think so.

“How are you?” he says, watching Dan wander aimlessly around the kitchen, fingers drifting over each of the cabinet handles. He always likes to feel things, but he doesn’t seem like he’ll wander very far today.

Dan shrugs, head tipping this way and that.

“Quiet,” he says, eventually.

Phil leaves him to it while he tries to sort the laundry. Dan usually does it, since he _isn’t a horrifying sock menace,_ as he mutters every time Phil pretends he might be willing to help. He’ll probably re-sort everything a week from now. Phil can make an attempt, though. Maybe.

Dan wanders in at some point, looming around for a minute before he finally hops up to sit on top of the washer. He’s still wearing the soft sweater he’d bought himself the other day. Phil had had to talk him into putting it on in the first place, but he hasn’t taken it off yet. His eyes track Phil as he moves around, with – what Phil weirdly hopes is a little bit of judgement. He doesn’t actually want to take over doing the laundry, first of all.

“Anything in here?” he asks, once the worst of the laundry is handled. The socks are still in a mismatched bundle, but nevermind. He reaches up to tap a finger against Dan’s temple, smiles when his nose wrinkles in annoyance. At least they’ve got that.

“Not really,” Dan says. “Just quiet.”

“In a bad way?”

Dan catches a finger in the hem of Phil’s sleeve. He rolls the fabric up, and then down, and then back up again, leaving Phil entirely mismatched.

“It’s – good, I guess. I just need to catch up on sleep, after last week. It’s fine.”

“You’re sure?” Phil presses.

Dan shrugs, expression shifting into something a little bit stubborn, a little bit more familiar. He catches Phil’s eye for a moment, smiling a little.

“Only peace we ever get, right?”

—

“They think it’s depression,” Dan says, soft.

He’d been dragged under by a cold that’s left him hoarse and aching. Phil had harassed him into seeing the doctor, tried to keep up with work just long enough to keep them afloat. At some point last week it had morphed from something that could be solved with a steady stream of cough drops, into – this. Into Dan, barely coughing any longer, staring into space and never giving any explanation.

“Really,” Phil says, carefully neutral.

Dan shrugs. His fingertips trace back and forth over the table’s edge like they’re in slow motion, none of his usual skittering and bouncing.

“Dan,” Phil presses, gently, after it’s gone on for a minute too long. He doesn’t look up, but his face twitches like at least it’s registered somewhere.

“They said I could – try things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Therapy.”

“Okay.”

Dan fusses a minute longer, dragging the backs of his knuckles along the edge now.

“Pills, I guess,” he finally says.

He doesn’t seem particularly interested in any of it, but Phil supposes that’s – to be expected, maybe. It’s farther than he’s gotten before, as far as Phil knows; more information than he’s ever come back with.

“You want to try?” he says.

“It doesn’t – like. It doesn’t feel like it’s right. I mean,” Dan starts, stumbling down a path that doesn’t even answer Phil’s question. “It’s.”

“It’s what, babe?”

“You’re not going to yell at me,” Dan says, flattened out, like it’s a command and not a question.

“Okay.”

Dan opens his mouth like he’s going to talk, but instead he stalls, face flickering from frustration to confusion and back in a moment. “Nevermind. I just think it’s – different. But I don’t – well. I just need, like, a couple of weeks so I can – I’ll sort this out, and then you don’t have to do all the work anymore.”

It’s more than he’s really said in a week, at least about anything important. Phil’s heart clenches at the idea that he’s just been worried about taking a few days off.

“I’m not going to yell at you for taking a break when you’re sick,” Phil says, softly. He reaches out, finally, catching the sleeve of Dan’s jumper, tugging him closer.

Dan shrugs as he goes, half-hearted, like what Phil’s saying isn’t getting through.

—

Dan’s gone bright pink. He’s squinting a little, like he can’t quite look at it.

Phil can’t stop laughing, between the shrieking on screen and Dan squirming beside him.

“I _hate_ you,” Dan bursts out, after a particularly good jump cut. “I don’t talk with my hands _that_ much.”

“You do!”

“I do not. I do not! You – fucking – you editing monster. You _dick._ You – I don’t do that every second,” Dan sputters. His hands are flailing out, and then clenching back to his chest, self-conscious.

“I’ll post it tonight?” Phil says. He tries to leave space for Dan to disagree. Usually he goes along with Phil’s ideas, harrumphs and whines and then agrees that it’s funny. Usually Phil catches it if he’s crossed the line. It’s just – risky, sometimes. Sometimes the line between Dan laughing with him and Dan being laughed at is so thin.

Dan frowns, and Phil can’t entirely tell if he’s serious or not. “I just look stupid,” he says, crossing his arms over his middle. “Like – some kind of spaz.”

Phil doesn’t have much to say to that.

“It’s not a bad thing,” is what he lands on. Dan’s frown just settles deeper. He doesn’t miss what Phil’s saying, doesn’t miss the confirmation behind it.

Phil rolls his eyes, crossing his arms to mirror Dan’s position. “You told me it’s not a bad thing last week, didn’t you?”

Dan’s properly glaring at him, now. Phil recognizes there’s interest behind it, the way there always is when Phil brings up things that Dan thinks he wasn’t listening to, but it’s not exactly friendly this time. “I said it’s not a bad thing for people to be – like, disabled. That article made a good point, is all I was saying. That doesn’t mean –”

“You think it counts for everyone else but not for you,” Phil interrupts.

Dan huffs. Phil wants to laugh, a bit, at how mad he gets about getting interrupted.

“I’m not – I’m just – like. Weird. That’s not the same thing.”

“You like it when I’m weird. Everyone likes it when I’m weird – you said that two hours ago, Dan.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

Dan huffs, rolling his eyes. His dimples are out in force suddenly, mouth twisted like he’s trying not to smile. He never admits defeat, but Phil can damn well tell by now when he’s run out of arguments.

“Smart arse,” Dan mutters, after a minute, like he wasn’t the one that started it.

–-

“How’re you?” Dan mumbles, flopping down beside him. Phil’s – he can’t even put words to it, but he gave up at some point, crawled into bed and yanked the covers up and wrote the whole day off as a lost cause. Dan had waved him away and gone back to blearily whacking at some editing that was meant to be done yesterday.

“Garbage. Like I’ve been microwaved,” Phil says.

_“Microwave,”_ Dan repeats, absently.

“Like a warm banana peel,” Phil continues. “Like a banana peel and it’s smoking and now the fire alarm is going to go off. And it’s two in the morning and all the neighbors hate us.”

“Like a hated banana peel, huh?”

“Yes,” Phil mumbles. He wiggles a bit, trying to get comfortable; he ends up with an arm slung over Dan’s waist and the rest of him diagonal across the bed, feet sticking out the other side.

“Two horrible hot bananas in a bed,” Dan starts singing, nonsensical and garbled from how half his face is still smooshed into the pillow. Phil’s asleep before he can make up the chorus.

-–

Trying things helps, eventually.

Dan slowly brings home words for things that he’s been searching for for years. He finally has someone else to confide in other than Phil. He backs down from arguments, even, carefully says that Phil’s perspective is interesting even if he doesn’t agree.

The medication is – a rockier road.

He’s intensely bad at remembering to take them, for one thing. It would be funny to Phil, if it didn’t feel like they spend about sixty percent of their day arguing over whether Dan’s set an alarm, or whether he’s already taken them, or whether he’s left them somewhere stupid, or whether he can play Mario Kart for five more minutes after the alarm goes off, just to beat this level, even though Phil damn well knows that he’ll forget by then.

“It’s like making you pick up your socks,” he says serenely one day, when Phil’s been cursed with a particularly splitting headache and Dan has, inexplicably, put the packet in a random cabinet and raised an absolute racket for an hour trying to retrace his own steps.

“Is this how you feel all the time,” Phil groans, slumped at the table.

“Yep,” Dan says, obnoxiously cheerful, leaning down to plant a kiss on Phil’s head. “We should get you a therapist so you can talk to them about how annoying I am.”

-–

Dan’s sprawled haphazardly on the couch. He’s been dead silent for half an hour, other than his fingers drumming away on the edge of the coffee table, or the click of a pen that he’s swiped from somewhere.

Phil can’t help glancing down at him, checking. Every time, Dan looks back, eyes bright and quick like he’s very much present.

“Hey, Dan?” Phil tries.

“Yeah?”

“Um,” Phil says. “So is this – you know. You said the pills were working, so – is this it, now?”

Dan shrugs, a funny shimmy against the cushion. “Guess so.”

“Quiet?”

Dan shakes his head, emphatic. He grins up at Phil, for a moment, one bright flash. He looks – a little off, now that Phil’s really looking. He can’t explain it.

“Loud as fuck,” Dan says, clicking the pen like it’s for emphasis. “Sorry. Just – I don’t know. Like the inside of a maraca.”

–-

He thrives on tour.

Phil worries for months beforehand that it’s just – too much. More work than Dan can process his anxieties about, too public, too long away from home. Too everything.

Instead it’s just this. Just Dan curled up beside him on the bus, laughing that he hasn’t kept a schedule like this since he worked at Asda. Just Dan, sleepy and grumpy and still tumbling out of bed to film a video, because they only have an hour and Phil needs him. Just Dan, bouncing on his toes backstage in the moments right before, smiling so brightly that it takes Phil’s breath away.

—

“I’m going to throw up,” Phil says, rather than hello.

“Hi?”

“Hi, Martyn,” he mumbles. He doesn’t understand how it is that he can feel so chastised, sometimes, when he’s just as much of an adult as his brother.

“Uh. Well,” Martyn says, “Sounds like this might kill you, but I was calling to ask if you’d remembered to fill out that last contract?”

Phil glances down at his own shaking hands. He’s struggling to keep his grip on his phone. He’s struggling to keep his grip on reality, really.

Dan’s drumming his fingers on the armrest between them, entirely focused on his own phone call.

“Is that a no?” Martyn says, when Phil doesn’t respond. He must’ve zoned out for longer than he’d realized.

He can’t say it. He doesn’t know why.

Dan’s voice cuts in suddenly, loud enough to startle Phil for the millionth time today. “It’s – I mean – how do I know if it’s really bad? Like, is this – it’s the spray one, with the powder? So does it crystallize? I’m sorry, I hate to ask more questions, I just –”

Phil tunes out. Again.

“Phil, for fuck’s sake,” Martyn says, softly.

“Couldn’t,” he manages to choke out, past the bile that’s threatening to rise up again. “Can’t. Sorry.”

“Are you at your gate, at least?”

It’s the _at least_ that gets him. At least, like it’s – like that’s simple, and it would be unheard of to say no. _At least._

He suddenly realizes that what he’s feeling might be fury, actually.

He’s fucking furious with Dan. He’s furious with how close they came to not making it, with the bakery for existing, with the idea of youtube videos as a whole. With himself for not saying _no_ for once in his life, for not shouting louder first thing in the morning when it could have made a difference, for not foreseeing exactly how this would play out.

He’s furious with his brother for asking, too, but – he supposes that maybe Martyn’s not at fault.

“Yep,” he finally manages. “Can you call the theatre?”

“Great. Sure,” Martyn says. Phil decides that he doesn’t give a fuck about the blatant frustration in his voice.

“Great,” he mimics, straining to sound cheerful. He’s not – he can’t answer questions about this. He loves his brother, but explaining this one to his brother, _the professional planner guy,_ just isn’t fucking happening. “Thanks. We’re boarding in a minute, so,” he lies. “See you in Australia.”

-–

Dan’s giggling.

Phil can never think how to describe it in sounds. He writes, sometimes, when they have a quiet moment and a thought comes to him, but the only thing he can ever say about Dan’s laugh is that it feels like his heart sings every time he hears it. It’s not a very good explanation; it doesn’t mean anything to anyone else.

Dan’s giggling, still. He’s landed with his feet up on the wall, back on the couch, essentially upside down. He keeps sending Phil things from apparently random sources, even though Phil’s only across the room, opening them on his laptop. There’s a tweet about witches in video games, and then an instagram of a drag queen doing something with a caption that Phil doesn’t entirely understand. There’s a video of a bird falling out of a tree, and a video of a toddler getting nipped by a turtle and crying, which Dan follows up with a quick _that’s you._

They’ve got half a video done, but then the whole thing to edit, and Dan’s got his project from ages ago. There’s emails, a constant stream of emails from their managers or from Martyn, asking questions they can barely answer.

Phil struggles to understand, sometimes, how it is that they have the entire day to do what they want and yet they so often end up stuck in this room in the middle of the night.

Dan’s giggling, though. He rolls until he’s back upright again, tapping his feet on the floor for a minute before he scrambles to sit on the back of the sofa instead, looming comically high up there. He doesn’t even look up from his phone.

Phil spins his chair around. He’s seen some of the videos – of Dan scrambling up a tree, jumping on the bed and shrieking with glee. He’s quieter now, in his own way, but Phil thinks he can see that in Dan when he’s like this.

Dan glances up, suddenly. He’s been grinning softly at something on his phone, but he breaks into a smile as soon as he catches Phil staring. He scrambles down from his perch.

“Sorry, it’s late,” he says, arms winding around Phil’s shoulders, aimless kisses pressed into his hair.

Phil glances at the viewfinder. He catches Dan looking, too, before he ducks his face and tucks it against the curve of Phil’s neck.

“I like staying up with you,” he says, quieter now that Dan seems to be settling down. “You look like you’re setting the world record for the world’s biggest koala.”

“Soft and round,” Dan says, solemn.

Phil laughs. He’s starting to doubt that they’re going to get any of it done tonight. Tomorrow suddenly seems like a new world of possibilities.

“Gonna find _your_ vertices,” Phil says. He makes an effort to wiggle his eyebrows, but mainly they just go up and up.

Dan squawks. “Round things don’t have vertices, you fucking oaf,” he says, and then he’s off laughing again.

\--

“Welcome to Danny’s Drama Den,” Dan mumbles, waving a vague hand at his bathtub kingdom. His hair’s plastered to his face, dripping wet like he’s just dunked himself.

“Thank you,” Phil says. “I think you ordered a Phil on TaskRabbit?”

“What?”

Phil flops onto the chair he’d pulled into the bathroom last week. “It’s an app where you can order men.”

Dan’s forehead crinkles, apparently deeply skeptical. Phil sometimes thinks that he’s just playing it up so he can make Phil try to explain things. “I know, but – what? An app where you can – excuse me? Order men for _what?”_

“To bring crisps to the upstairs bathroom,” Phil says. “That’s what you used it for, anyways.”

“Seems like a good use of money,” Dan mutters.

“Plus you forgot to specify that the man should bring the crisps _and_ share them with you, so.”

Dan rolls his eyes, but he finally smiles at that. “Are you going to hoover once you drop half of them on the floor?”

“Nope.”

“Great. This seems like the worst app.”

“It’s valued at a billion pounds,” Phil says. Or tries to say, although he supposes it’s drowned out by the sound of him popping the crisp bag open.

He doesn’t really know if Dan’s heard him, but he figures it’s not the time for instigating a rant about the economics of apps. They fall into a comfortable silence. The water splashes a bit as Dan fusses with things, kicking his wine glass out of the bath and onto the little side table they’d also pulled in. It’s a whole situation in here now. Phil munches on his crisps, probably too loudly.

He glances up at Dan at some point. He’s staring fixated at a point in the water. His lips are twitching every few seconds.

“You want me to write something down?” Phil says, mumbled between handfuls.

He has access to Dan’s disaster of a google doc, where all the random bits go. Some of it is entirely nonsense, random words that they haven’t been able to piece together into a sentence. A lot of it is things Phil’s written while sitting here.

The whole thing is – overwhelming, and exciting, and somehow godforsakenly tedious at the same time. Dan has seemed on the verge of crumbling at times, leaning into Phil just to stay upright.

_It’s like I’m at mile two of a marathon and I’ve just remembered that I fucking hate running,_ he’d joked at one point.

Phil distantly knows that he would have chafed at that even a year ago. He would have sighed in that way that never fails to send Dan into a tailspin, probably; would have gone to bed alone and listened to Dan’s sullen typing through the wall for so many hours that he might as well have just stayed up and done it himself in the first place.

Now it’s just – Phil finds himself laughing, when Dan cracks jokes like that. He finds himself being kinder when Dan drags his feet. They can work side-by-side and not compare the details of who got what done. He’s the one who’s been ordering the bath bombs and the wine and the little tray to go over the bath, handing Dan a steady stream of little gifts to ease his way.

He doesn’t have to catch Dan in the middle of a breakdown and wonder if he’s the cause of it. That’s what ends up being the most true.

“Hey, Earth to Dan?” he says, when he realizes Dan hasn’t responded.

Dan startles, flinching hard enough as he comes back to earth that the water splashes up against the side. He curls in on himself, for a second, turning to Phil with wide, wild eyes.

“What?” he says, voice rough.

“Nevermind,” Phil says. He reaches out, smoothing a hand over Dan’s bare shoulder. Dan tilts into the contact, sighing softly. “How’s it going?”

“Sucks.”

He’s looking at Phil so openly, right now. His eyes are rimmed red from earlier, face gone slack with exhaustion. He looks overwhelmed and stressed and hopeful, all at once, and he’s doing absolutely nothing to hide any of it.

Phil doesn’t want to think that there were barriers, before, but – well. Maybe there were.

“You want me to write anything?”

Dan shakes his head. His mouth twists funny for a moment, this way and that.

“No. I don’t know. I’m trying not to get – like, impatient,” he says.

“Impatient?”

“I mean – I don’t want to rush it? Except I do want to rush it. And then – like, I don’t know, I’m mad all the time because I want to be proud of it but I don’t – I don’t know how to get there,” he says. “As usual.”

“You talked about it?”

Dan wrinkles his nose. “Yeah. Therapy doesn’t stop me from being an impatient dickhead.”

Phil supposes that makes sense. He nods a little, stuffing a handful of crisps in his mouth. Dan frowns when one crumbles, scattering on the tile.

“What about time travel?” Phil says.

“Sometimes I think you think I go and visit a witch every week.”

Phil shrugs, ticking off each argument on his fingers. He’s a bit clumsy what with trying to hold the crisp bag at the same time, but he manages. “You go. You tell her your secrets. She makes some prophecies about the future. Maybe she lets you have a potion. And lastly… you do get a muffin on the way home. That’s basically the same as a witch.”

Dan holds out a hand for a crisp, which Phil begrudgingly gives up, carefully arranging it in the driest part of his palm.

“I also think you don’t know what witches are.”

“Wrong,” Phil says, smugly snatching the rest of the bag away when Dan reaches for more. “I _am_ a witch.”

\--

“I’m going on a run.”

“A what?”

Dan looks up from his drawer of weird running-related knick knacks, smiling quizzically. Phil can’t figure out why he needs _accessories_ to run from one place to another like a caveman in peril.

“A run,” Dan repeats, slowly, enunciating funny like maybe Phil didn’t understand the words. “You know, like, that thing where you go running?”

Phil’s brain helpfully supplies an image of the last time Dan went running.

He would love to live in the present, but the memory of Dan stumbling into the apartment after hours out in the rain, the awful gasping sobs over a protein shake – well. He’d looked so out of place that Phil would’ve laughed at how ridiculous the whole thing was, if he hadn’t been so absolutely shaken by that meltdown, so gripped with his own anxiety about how they could somehow end up exactly where they were ten years ago in the old flat in Manchester, sitting on the floor in the kitchen while Dan chokes out that he wants to quit.

Phil must make a face in the present. There’s a big warm palm against his cheek, Dan’s soft lips on his.

“No crazy,” Dan murmurs. “Promise. I’m just going for a little bit until it’s quieter.”

“What?”

Dan pulls away gently, waving a vague hand in the general direction of his head. “Arcade brain.”

Phil blinks up at him, curious. He’s never sure what _arcade brain_ exactly means. The running does help, Dan says. Phil doesn’t get it beyond that. It sounds like anxiety, except that – Dan talks about anxiety, now, uses whole sentences for it. And anyways, Phil doesn’t think running in public places would help with anxiety. Maybe that’s self-centered, but – he really doesn’t get it.

“Okay?” Dan says, looking up from tying his shoes. He looks – eager, Phil thinks, suddenly all smiles instead of wobbling between bored and irate like he has been all day. It’s like a dog about to go for a walk. It’s extremely weird.

Phil grins back, lopsided. He doesn’t get it, but Dan looks so _happy._

“Pinky promise, no crazy?” he says.

Dan laughs and comes back, sticking out his pinky for Phil to shake.

“Is that better?” he says.

“Yeah.”

Dan laughs again, gently poking at Phil’s side just to make him squawk. He plants a kiss on Phil’s head, careful not to disturb the quiff, and mumbles a quick love you before he’s out the door.

—

“– don’t have time to make breakfast, really. So I got one of those waterproof waist belt bags, you know? And I just put it in there. It mixes while I run, basically.”

“What?” Phil says.

“The oatmeal,” Adrian says.

Phil couldn’t put the pieces of this conversation together if his life depended on it.

“The coconut milk one,” Dan says, like that helps. Phil doesn’t know anything about a coconut milk oatmeal.

Dan and Adrian are already onto something else; something about watches that Phil can’t follow.

The food finally arrives, and Phil bolts downstairs to grab it.

He realizes as he’s putting the burgers on plates that Dan _actually_ ordered him bacon as a topping, even after Phil backtracked. He debates picking it off, for a moment, but – it is the only thing about this weird bean burger situation that actually sounds good. He tries to tuck it further under the bun before he takes them back to the table.

“Sorry,” he blurts out as he sits down, ruining his stealth mode within half a second. “I accidentally ordered bacon.”

“Oh,” Adrian says, eyes going wide. “That’s so good. You’re a dirty hippie!”

Dan laughs. “Is that a thing?”

Adrian nods, holding a fist out in Phil’s direction until he awkwardly bumps it. “Welcome to the club,” Adrian says quietly, casting a look at Dan that Phil hopes is only jokingly scornful.

They fall into a silence that’s – awkward on Phil’s end. He can’t tell if they feel the same.

It’s weird to think of Dan as part of a _they_ that doesn’t include him.

“Dan said you were looking at grad schools?” Phil says. It’s basically the only thing Dan’s mentioned about Adrian that feels like common ground.

Adrian shrugs, chewing slowly.

“I don’t think that whole situation is for me,” he says.

“What situation?”

“Like, you know. Academics.”

“Oh. Dan said you liked where you were?”

“Yeah, but. It’s like, I like learning stuff but I don’t think school suits people like us, you know?”

Phil doesn’t know what _people like us_ means until Dan snorts, nodding away in the corner of Phil’s eye.

“It’s like a vortex,” Adrian continues. “People just go because their parents tell them to go, and then you’re there and you have to do everything right then, on someone else’s schedule. We’re not built like that, you know?”

Adrian hesitates when Phil doesn’t come up with a proper answer. Dan’s busy with his burger and apparently thinks they can have their own conversation without him, which – Phil’s increasingly unsure of.

“Sorry,” Adrian barrels on, vaguely anxious all of a sudden in that way that has a current of stubborness running under it, like a stream under ice. Phil recognizes that immediately. “I don’t know if ADHD is like that for Dan, I guess. I just assumed.”

“What?” Phil says.

“You’re right,” Dan says at the same time, finally joining them again. “I mean, not that I have that, really. Wait –”

“You think you don’t?”

“You think you do?” Dan says at the same time.

Adrian shrugs, picking at his own burger for a moment. “Everyone does.”

“What?” Phil manages to repeat.

Adrian smiles, rolling his eyes a little. His expressions are terrifyingly familiar, sometimes.

Dan settles a hand on Phil’s knee, squeezing gently. He has a look on his face that Phil can only recognize as _wikipedia face._

“Runners, I mean. I think. Uh, and Howells.”

“You think we all do?” Dan says, but – more curious than bewildered, now.

“Dad was like that.”

Dan pulls a face. Adrian mirrors it.

“Don’t really love the thought of being like him,” Dan says eventually, popping a single escaped bean into his mouth. He doesn’t deny it, though.

Phil doesn’t know anything more about that situation than what Dan’s told him. It isn’t much to go off of.

“That’s why I think being – like, focused on running is so important,” Adrian says after a minute. His voice has gone soft like Dan’s does, sometimes. “I just think without it it would be… I don’t know.”

“Arcade brain,” Phil says.

Dan laughs, first at Phil’s halfway-helpful input, and then at Adrian’s confused expression.

“It’s when you – you know. When your brain sounds like the inside of an arcade,” Dan says. He wiggles his fingers in the general direction of his head. The explanation is kind of nonsense, but Adrian smiles in recognition anyways, nodding a little.

“I’m glad you started running,” Adrian says eventually. He’s finally most of the way through his burger, though Phil assumes it’s ice cold by now.

“Me, too,” Dan says, reaching to snatch a crumb of bacon off Phil’s plate.

—

“I guess I just thought – like. That if everything was – if I was out, I guess, and everything was – if everything settled down, you know? With – whatever. Then I would be fine. And now it’s… we got here and everything’s good, but it’s just – my stupid brain was broken the whole time, I guess. Like super broken? And I didn’t even want to talk about it because it’s just – that’s so permanent, Phil.”

Phil doesn’t particularly like that line of thought.

“It’s not that bad,” Phil says. He feels sure that he’s repeating himself. “I think it’s a pretty good brain, actually.”

He tries to be gentle, but he’s suddenly remembering the last time they had this conversation, how Dan had listed every single incident of disrepair like he was in confession, how he’d suddenly dug his heels in the moment Phil tried to reassure him or suggest any kind of solution.

Dan groans like he always does. He pokes at Phil’s side, rolling over so he’s squashing Phil’s middle into the mattress like some horrible spaghetti trap. He kicks his feet until Phil wraps his arms around his shoulders and clamps down, clinging like a massive koala. Even that doesn’t stop him, really. He wiggles for a moment and then grabs for his weighted blanket, yanking it haphazardly over them before he finally goes limp in Phil’s arms.

“Like napping with a steamroller,” Phil moans, straining to expand his ribs enough to talk.

Dan just hums happily, burrowing impossibly closer.

He goes quiet for a while, then. Phil can only tell he’s awake because he’s gently playing with the hem of Phil’s shirt.

“How do you just accept that that’s how it is,” Dan says, eventually, so quiet that Phil isn’t sure if he’s heard him right.

“How what is?”

“Being – like,” he tries, “you know.”

“I don’t.”

Dan huffs, wiggling. “Weird.”

“Are you saying I’m weird?” Phil says, teasing. He gently tugs at a lock of Dan’s hair, doesn’t miss how he sighs into it for no good reason.

“Yeah,” Dan says, softly, like he thinks Phil’s dead serious. “A little bit.”

“I mean, it’s not my problem. Stupid to worry about it.”

“I’m stupid, then,” Dan mumbles.

Phil chomps down on his hair, impulsive. It’s right there under his chin, and it distracts Dan from whatever path he’s going down.

“You walked into that,” Dan says, when he’s done shrieking and he’s got Phil’s hair tangled in his fingers, other hand safely pinning Phil’s right wrist to the bed, just in case it wants to commit any other crimes.

“Yeah,” Phil says. “Should know by now.”

“I just don’t get how you don’t – I don’t know. Maybe it’s different.”

There’s a lot Phil could say. It takes him a minute to sort out what would be survivable. Sometimes this new Dan baffles him with how close they can get to the edge, peering over emotional cliffs all the time and talking about what’s below.

“It’s annoying when people don’t get it, but it’s – I don’t know what I would do without it. Being weird is like – the one reliable thing.”

“Would love to be reliable,” Dan says, gloomier than Phil was hoping.

Phil laughs anyways, experimentally wiggles the hand that’s still trapped under Dan’s.

“What’s it feel like?”

“What?”

“You know. Arcade brain.”

Dan grimaces. Phil feels it against his shoulder more than he sees it. “Should we just call it what it is?”

“That sounds so fucking clinical.”

“It _is_ clinical,” Dan says. They’ve definitely had this conversation before. “It just feels like – like – I’m in one of those hamster balls. Like I’m just running and I’m not getting anywhere and going to crash into something but I can’t see what I’m going to crash into, so I can’t even stop it.”

“And there’s a ten year old chasing you so you don’t fall down the stairs?”

Dan lifts his head a bit, squashing Phil down even more. He stares down at Phil, so close that his eyes start to cross, forehead crinkling.

“Yeah. I’m so glad your business prepared you for living with me,” he says, slowly.

“That just sounds like anxiety, doesn’t it?”

Dan flops down, head thunking back against Phil’s shoulder.

“Helena made fun of me,” he mumbles, suddenly gloomy again.

“She can’t do that.”

“I said it was just anxiety and she asked when I have _baseless_ anxiety and it’s like –” he pauses, taking a sharp breath. “I _don’t_ because all the stupid shit I worry about is stuff that I have done, and it is actually my fault, and if I don’t admit that it’s my fault then I’m just being a dick to you because you have to take care of it, but if I do admit it then I just can’t stop thinking about it and it’s – fuck, it’s so fucking loud all the time.”

Phil wiggles his hand until he realizes that Dan’s given up on pinning his wrist, anyways. He digs through the pile of blankets until he can slip it under Dan’s shirt, flattening his palm against Dan’s ribs.

“And you thought she was making fun of you?” he says, finally.

“Felt like a trap,” Dan says.

“Oh.”

Dan snorts.

“What if it’s – what if it’s not your fault and you just think it is because you do have anxiety, though,” Phil continues.

“Do you really think it’s not my fault,” Dan says, quiet.

“You don’t mean to.”

Dan falls silent for a long time.

“That’s not the same thing,” he says, eventually. “It just goes in circles. I don’t mean to but it’s still – I still worry about it being unfair, Phil. I’m tired of feeling like that.”

“Okay,” Phil says. “So you talked to Helena already?”

“No. I mean, yeah. Kind of. I just – I wanted to know if there was anything else before I brought it up. I didn’t really say anything, but I talked to Adrian when he was still in Portugal, and I talked to my mum, and I wanted to talk to you first. I mean – you know me better than anyone.”

Phil breathes out, rubbing an absent thumb over one of Dan’s ribs. “Are you going to talk to her?”

“Yeah,” Dan says, squirming closer, always moving under Phil’s hands even when he wants to be still. “Yeah, I think so.”

**Author's Note:**

> Huge huge humongous thank you to Daye and Jude and Cat and Puddle for babysitting the hell out of this, you're all wonderful. <3 
> 
> Come visit me at [chickenfreeblog](https://chickenfreeblog.tumblr.com/) where we're once again asking you to look at Brad Leone's face.


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